Literary Birthday – 7 September – Michelle Paver

Happy Birthday, Michelle Paver, born 7 September 1960

Five Quotes

I wrote my first story when I was five: a rip-roaring adventure about an escaped Tyrannosaurus rex and a rabbit called Hamish. I don’t remember what made me start writing stories: it was just something I knew I wanted to do, as soon as I could read.

[A writer’s life is] marginalized, solitary and not in the slightest bit grown-up. I spend my entire time day-dreaming, and getting paid for it. That’s why I love it.

I used to get up very early in the morning in order to put in a couple of hours before going to the office, and sometimes I’d sit at my desk listening to the dawn chorus starting up outside, and ask myself if I was completely crazy, wasting my time like this? But the thought of chucking it in – of not writing – was just too bleak to contemplate. So I’d make another mug of coffee and shuffle back to my desk, and get on with it.

Fear is the loneliest feeling. You can be in a throng of people, but if you’re afraid, you’re on your own.

Evil exists in us all. Some fight it. Some feed it. That’s how it’s always been.

Michelle Paver is a British novelist and children’s writer, probably best known for the fantasy series Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. She won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize in 2009, a once-in-a-lifetime book award judged by a panel of British children’s writers.